


The Taste of Love and Loss

by AJ_Lenoire



Series: The Taste of Life [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, One-Shot (Kinda), Romance, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 19:30:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3393569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJ_Lenoire/pseuds/AJ_Lenoire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha returns from the depths of Russia, her covers reinstated. She is surprised to find that Steve has not been idle whilst she is gone, and discovers that, maybe, if she wanted a quiet life, she should have stayed in Russia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Taste of Love and Loss

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a sequel to "The Taste of Freedom" but its not something you NEED to read to get this.

**_2014 – Washington, DC, USA_ **

She watches as the man walks into the museum, seemingly so normal. No one knows he comes from another time, nor the inhuman gifts he possesses; so strong, so fast. But she knows, and she watches as he enters the building to read about his life, his war, and his friend he had thought was gone forever. Her hand comes to her chest, where only half her heart beats. Thanks to him. She watches and she waits, for her mission lies in his mind. And she always completes her missions. 

But she knows now is not the time, nor is she the face. She knows how this works, how he will reset to his base function until he chooses a life, a _person_ to settle into. All logic and sense dictates a high probability of one, even though she hopes desperately for another.

She hates herself for that, because not only is she begging for one of the few people she trusts (and genuinely likes) to lose a close friend forever, but she is begging for a murderer to surface.

 _Love is for children_. She reminds herself. But now she sees why she has to remind herself in the first place, why she has to force back feelings; a sister for the hawk, a friend for the captain, a lover for the soldier. Now she sees why. She has always been a child, she has simply buried it. And he, this unsuspecting man, is the one who makes her feel so childish, simply by being in her presence. She is reduced to a child in his vicinity. He was the first man she loved.

Which is why she stays in the shadows until he is in the museum, and why she says and does nothing but leave when he has, and why it breaks her heart to do so. He was the first man she loved, which is why he has always tasted like love and loss.

* * *

**_Three Days Later_ **

_“Five years ago, I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. Somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out. But the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer so he shot him straight through me. Soviet slug. No rifling. Bye-bye, bikinis.”_

She still has nightmares about it. Even five, nearly six years later. Of course, she has nightmares about a lot of things. Clint under Loki’s control. The Red Room. The hospital fire... She can’t remember the last night she slept without a nightmare, even if she has managed to distance herself just enough to stop waking in a panicked sweat, a scream lodged in her throat.

It took a lot of guts to tell Steve about that day, but it was the only way to get him to understand the danger. And Steve had, he had understood perfectly. Someone who managed to shoot Natasha Romanov was a dangerous person, a force to be reckoned with. The thing was, she hadn’t told him everything. There are some things even Steve Rogers, even Clint Barton don’t know about her. Some things they can never know.

And now, she lies in her room in the Avengers tower, on her side, gazing at the window that spans an entire wall of this luxurious room. It’s a beautiful view, and she envies Tony how he could have grown up with such magnificence, whereas she was prodded and poked and experimented on. There are still nights when she wakes, screaming from the fire. Then she remembers the past cannot be changed. Then she tries to justify.

Tony may have had this view, and the money, but she had structure. People would think her stupid and insane for saying that, choosing the life that was little more than torture simply for _structure_. But she likes structure. Without structure, she would not be fluent in over ten languages, she would not be an Olympic-level gymnast, she would not be the best martial artist in the country, possibly even the world.

She would not be broken and alone.

But that was not because of the structure. It was because she had broken the structure. Even though she knows it’s stupid, some part of her believes that the structure was good. Everything was bearable, and she had had _him_. But then she broke the structure, they both did, and they forgot about boundaries and how she was a student and he was her instructor and she lost him. She was spun into a world where she had to fight for everything, and she knew no one. That’s the part of her that he never managed to open. The part whose eyes are still firmly shut, mind still impossibly narrow. Like when melting ice, he had not defrosted the very center of her, not gotten _everything_. Perhaps, if he had, things would be different. Maybe he would still be alive, still be James and not this faceless “Winter Soldier”. Maybe they would have tortured _her_ and wiped _her_ mind instead.

Love is for children. She loved him as a child and she lost him because she was childish enough to put him and herself in danger. She killed him as much as she would have by holding a gun to him temple, as much as she would have if she had actually tried to strangle him on the bridge.

Now her thoughts turn to the other him.

She doesn’t love him. Not romantically at least. And she would never admit that she loved him in any way, it’s hard enough admitting that to herself. But he is the person she trusts most. In her life, she has only ever trusted three people. The first one is dead, thanks to her. He is the second, her brother of sorts. Love may be for children, but whether or not she is a child remains to be seen. Either way, she owes him a debt. A huge debt.

* * *

**_2001 – Kiev, Ukraine_ **

She remembers the day, the shock that somehow, he had managed to slip her radar. He had been following her with the tux and she’d arrogantly dismissed him as merely interested in her. Which was understandable, her mark was one she needed seduced, so she was wearing a slip of a dress that was practically falling off her body, blood red like her hair and lips, and she was getting more than a few stares. She even threw him a delicate wink, and she saw him panic. She just hadn’t realised the panic had been because he had thought she knew who and what he was. She hadn’t.

He may have fooled her, but not for very long. Soon she was fighting tooth and nail to battle him, the dress gone, somewhere in the frenzy she slipped on her leather fighting gear, gun at her leg, knife in her boot, the sparkling dress ripped to shreds next to the dead man. She was surprised he was so good, but he was not better than her. She had the Red Room under her belt. She had training from the Winter Soldier. He had, as she would later discover, circus tricks.

She had pinned him to the ground and was ready to slit his throat when she saw the crest on his shoulder, and she froze. Something in the back of her mind flickered, and she remembered the Red Room telling her that the eagle, the shield was a danger that must be destroyed. But then she remembered how the Red Room had taken everything from her, and she had stepped back, allowed him room to breathe but taken one of his guns and trained it at his head.

Later, they would agree to put down the guns and they would talk. He would say he did not want to kill her and though she did not trust him, she soon followed him voluntarily. She would become a valuable member to his team, a highly valued asset and not treated like a piece of crap like she was last time she worked for an organisation with no face. After a few months of work, the tenseness around her let up and she began to believe this was no elaborate plot, and that they were not going to kill her when her guard was down.

Within a year, they were staunch allies and she was working for the organisation sent to kill her. Within eight years, she was part of STRIKE Team Delta, so talented in her field that she was considered for the Avengers’ Initiative, along with her partner, because they ranked in usefulness and effectiveness alongside gods, despite having no powers of their own. She was wiping the red and the Red from her ledger, one scrub at a time, and she almost felt happy.

She had no qualms about the reason they had found her in the first place; lots of people wanted her dead. Lots of people still do. The only difference is now there are both more and less.

* * *

**_2014 – Downtown Brooklyn, NY, USA_ **

He fumbles for the keys as he jogs up the stairs to his apartment. Tomorrow he leaves for his search, and he leaves with Sam. SHIELD is still down, Natasha and Fury are off the grid until further notice. HYDRA is disbanded, or at the very least hindered. He feels he’s earned a drink. Even if he hates the taste and he can’t get drunk, it feels appropriate.

And after the events of the last few weeks he’s not even surprised when he finds Natasha sat on his couch after he unlocks the door and walks in. By way of greeting she doesn’t even look up from the book she’s reading. Instead, she says “all of your alcohol is crap”.

He resists the urge to roll his eyes, “I don’t drink.” He replies, “And good evening, by the way, make yourself at home.”

“You sassin’ me, soldier?” she asks him with a heavier-than-natural American accent; smirking when, for a moment, he twitches and feels the urge to snap to attention, to bark _no, ma’am_ and salute.

She likes him for this. Likes him for his simple goodness. He has such start views of black and white and she still can’t for the life of her fathom why he even likes her. Probably because he doesn’t know what she’s done. He will soon enough, the rest of the world already knows. She wonders now how much SHIELD knew. Not everything, never everything. She won’t have to invent a new cover so much as unearth one from her Red Room days. She’ll be gone for two months out of necessity, but at least six of her own accord. She needs a break, and she has her own mission to complete. If anyone minds, they can take it up with her, but it won’t change her mind.

Agent Maria Hill is now working (and living) at Stark Industries, more commonly known as the Avengers Tower, alongside Tony and Pepper, who have opened their arms and doors to any of the Avengers and the SHIELD agents to whom the Avengers were close. But Steve wanted an apartment in Brooklyn, like his old home. She understands, she’d hate to live with big, loud Tony all the time; sometimes she needs quiet and solitude. She is relatively sure neither word exists in Tony’s vocabulary. But she lives there anyway because it’s the only really safe place for her. State of the art security, and filled (in a loose sense, there are less than ten residents) only with people whom she considers allies. One of whom she actually trusts. Maybe, if Steve was there, maybe the number would rise to two.

But tonight she needed company, and Clint was still on his other mission. Steve told her, after, that Clint had been dragged back to the States by Peirce, told to take Steve down, but he’d deliberately failed, and told Cap of the tracker in his uniform. He’d always be on Steve’s side. On Natasha’s side. More than once the hawk had told her that he wasn’t loyal to SHIELD, he was loyal to Fury and Hill and Coulson, the three people who knew what they were doing and who genuinely had the world’s best interest at heart. Later, he’d added that he was loyal to her, too. Even later, the Avengers as a team.

Steve instead pulls something random and strong from the cupboard, and takes out two small tumblers. He doesn’t know the first thing about alcohol quality, least of all in this day and age, but he knows that for people like Natasha, stronger is better.

“I apologise for the lack of vodka.” He adds as he pours two drinks. She smirks and takes one, downing it like it’s nothing and slamming the glass on the table. She looks him dead in the eye.

“Don’t like the taste anyway.”

And she doesn’t. Not since she broke down the KGB. Vodka reminds her of the Red Room, because all she saw until she was eighteen was the inside of that facility, and the surrounding, heavily guarded grounds. Vodka tastes like murdered girls, like training exercises and instructors who “broke in” the other four who made the cut. It tastes like a bullet through the abdomen. It tastes like the man she loved and the man she lost. At this she grabs the bottle from the table and unscrews it. She abandons social decorum and swigs directly from it, needing a buzz to shut up her mind. She carries no germs, and Steve rarely drinks anyway. All of the bottles are nearly full, and she knows for a fact that’s only because he pours some away every now and then to feign normality with his neighbours.

She pities him for still thinking normal is possible – but maybe it is, for him. He came from a different time, but still a kind and open world. She came from a meticulously structured hell-hole. There is no chance for normality when it comes to her, but maybe there is for Steve, so she says nothing about this.

He says something about her manners though.

“You’re gonna get killer hangover.”

“I have a high tolerance, Rogers.” She said, “I might not be a super-soldier, but I’ve got the same serum running around inside of me.” She takes another swig, “But not so much that it doesn’t make me forget.”

“Forget what?” he asks, and he knows that’s a stupid question. Forget everything.

“Everything.” She echoes his thoughts, “I’ve done some stuff I’m not proud of. But I can’t say I have many regrets.”

“That’s not what you wanna forget tonight, though, is it?” he asks her, and he looks at her with big, sad eyes. She meets his gaze neutrally.

“Maybe not.” She admits, “But you’re the only one who won’t mind my breaking in and drinking your alcohol.” She punctuates this with another hearty gulp.

There is a long silence after that, and the question is on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t know if he wants to know the answer, he doesn’t know if he can bear the answer, and he doesn’t know if he’s ready to admit there’s more to his friends than meets the eye. More than the highly-trained SHIELD Agent and the boy from Brooklyn. he wants them to stay like that, to stay simple. But nothing is simple anymore. And eventually, he decides he has come too far to stop now.

“Did you know him?”

* * *

**_2009 – Odessa, Iran_ **

“ _I’ll need a few minutes to change them._ ” He’s babbling in a language she can’t identify right away, but it flows from her own mouth in perfect fluency anyway.

“ _I’ll cover you, but be quick about it!_ ” she replies, and she stands in front of him with a gun cocked and her eyes out. Clint isn’t here, he’s off on his own mission. He is no help here, but she can handle it. She needs him to be quick, because he’s her mark, and the longer he’s out in the open the more danger he’s in. She could probably change the tires herself, but not quickly enough. As for the rest of the car...as long as it starts up she doesn’t care. If Clint had been here she would have made him stay in the car with the engineer, but he’s not, and they’re a two-man team right now. The only person protecting her is her.

Thanks to the fire, her ears are like a bat’s, and she hears the sound of small rocks crackling along a steep slope. Someone is coming down. Most likely the guy who blew out the tires in the first place. She cocks her gun and flexes her hands in the leather gloves as she hears the crumbling of the small pebbles, and though she turns her head, she doesn’t leave her mark’s side. He’s a nuclear engineer, a valuable asset and a danger in the wrong hands. Like Tony, but a smaller ego. This also means a lot of people want him dead. She doesn’t recognise the person approaching her at first. All she can make out is long brown hair and black clothing. Then he raises the gun and she sees that the silver was not a mirage in the hot sun. It was his arm.

Several things happen at once.

She screams at the engineer to get inside the car, and she worries even herself because she doesn’t scream, not in anger or pain or panic. This is what he does to her, makes her forget that she is Natalia Romanova, makes her forget that she earned the title of the Black Widow. She’d thought he’d be dead by now, now that the Red Room had fallen – she felled it with her own hands. But no, someone else had kept him in an ice coffin, someone else had scrubbed his mind clean. And she knew exactly how much danger the engineer was in before he even pulled the trigger and narrowly missed her head.

It’s only because of her own marksmanship and a whole lot of luck that she manages to disable his gun, catching one of the vital pieces of machinery that make it work, making it jam and rendering it useless. She sees him throw it to the side carelessly and break into a run. His face is covered with a plastic mask and goggles, but she still knows it’s him.

The engineer is still working on the tyre because if it doesn’t start then the truck is of no use to them, not even as cover. When she runs forward to buy him more time and meets the James-but-not-James puppet in hand-to-hand combat, she feels as though for a moment she is a little girl again, and he’s putting her through her paces.

But then she catches his goggles and rips them off, and she sees the same awful thing in his eyes that has only gotten worse in these past decades. He looks at her and she is no longer his Natalia. She is no longer the colleague and the mission partner. He looks at her and he does not recognise her at all. So much so is her pain and shock that it’s all she can do to knock off the lower half of the mask, and see his face one last time, deliver one strong but futile blow before he overpowers her.

He rams her against the truck and she’s too exhausted even to cry out. She feels the bullet pierce right through her, and into the engineer. She doesn’t bother turning to try and save him. James always finished a job correctly, and she knows this thing with his face does too. He has his gun pressed to the wound, where he shot through her because try as he might she would not move and he couldn’t move her. She moves now, slumps to the floor and he lets her land unceremoniously. Once he would have caught her. But then again, once he wouldn’t have shot her in the first place.

As she lies in a pool of blood, some the engineer’s but mostly her own because her heart – broken and scarred as it is – is still pumping, she looks at his face, and he doesn’t recognise her. He only stands over her, watching with, well, now it looks like curiosity. Before it had been blank determination, but now he’s looking at her like she’s a unicorn or something.

“James...” her voice is a rasp and she’s losing consciousness, but she feels she needs to say this. Because she has already hurt him so much, with her reckless love for him, all those years ago. If she had shut him out or made him see sense, maybe he’d still be alive. _Really_ alive. “If you’re still in there...I forgive you.” It is not in her nature to forgive, but she knows this is not his doing, and if he is not dead, and if she dies, he has to know. But it seems he is, because as she falls unconscious, she vaguely hears a voice ask _who’s James?_

* * *

Later, because of her injury and the trauma and the shame of failing a mission, she will never realise that the only person who could have called an ambulance was the Winter Soldier. Their path had been so meticulous that no one else saw them, and their comm units and trackers had been disabled with a sonic blast. SHIELD would not have got there in time, but the local ambulance did. She never really twigged that some of James was crying out from the Soldier.

In the depths of Russia, whilst she healed, he was asking who the girl was, why she seemed to know him, why she called him James. He receives no answer, only a gum-shield to stick in his mouth and bite down on, because his screams are annoying. Later, he will remember nothing of the pretty red-headed girl. He still has a Red wall, and it is thicker and stronger than ever.

* * *

**_2014 – Downtown Brooklyn, NY, USA_ **

_“Did you know him?”_

Him. Steve says no names but they both know who he’s talking about. Natasha shows no sign of having heard, apart from the fact that she stops raising the bottle to her lips again. She pauses for ten solid seconds, then drinks a long drink, pauses, swallows, pauses again, and then turns to him.

“I knew someone.” She tells him, choosing her words carefully. Because she knows that the man Steve knew and the man she were different, just as the man she knew and the man he is now are different. But Steve hasn’t quite twigged that, she thinks. He thinks he was Bucky right up to the end, when he was regressed by the KGB or HYDRA or whoever. “But that man was not him.” She pauses before adding, because he needs to understand, “Just like he wasn’t Bucky.”

It’s cruel, she knows, but it’s the truth, and she knows from experience that hoping someone will be as they are in your memory only leads to heartbreak. Steve has to understand that his friend is gone, even if he existed after he was taken by the Red Room, he is long gone now. And, to her surprise, it seems that Steve knows this, because he doesn’t break anything or burst out raging. Instead he scrutinises her, and she tries to rearrange her face into the emotionless mask like she normally does. But she knows it won’t work; it seems giving someone her trust allows them to see through it like a window.

“You hoped once, didn’t you?” he says, and she looks at him with a blank but mildly irritated look. He continues, “You hoped he was the same and you found he wasn’t. And don’t lie to me.” He adds, “I’m sick of being lied to and I like to think I mean more to you than that. I know what you’re feeling.”

She shakes her head, still impassive and blank, but a single tear rolls down her cheek now. She was unable to stop it, and that’s when Steve knows the gravity of this, because the Black Widow doesn’t cry. He is not seeing the Widow, not Natasha Romanov, but Natalia Romanova. The _real_ woman before him, or at least her ghost, because the Red Room killed her just like they killed Bucky. And later, James. Her voice trembles slightly as she says, “No, you don’t. You really don’t.”

Steve looks at her, and feels pity. He knows that he shouldn’t, that Natasha hates pity and mercy because she still thinks it’s weak. But he feels it anyway. And he supposes he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what Bucky was to her, but Bucky was his best friend, through thick and thin. That should count for something. And he tells her as much. Though Natasha is not willing to open up her past, at least on an emotional level, she listens. She listens to the man James was, the man _Bucky_ was. And she feels her half-heart break even more once she realises that that is not James, and for her to wish James’ return would be a wish that Bucky never would. And she could never do that to Steve. On the off chance that James still has his memories, just like she did, he will become Bucky, because Bucky was who he was first.

She hates herself for wishing Bucky never comes back, but she’s hated herself for so long that it doesn’t really change anything.

* * *

She stays the night with him, and the conversation isn’t too painful as she tells him of James, and he tells her of Bucky – though she tactfully leaves out the part where they were lovers. She tells him how he was the first person she trusted, how, even with no real memory of Bucky, he still existed in how James spoke out (and though this is not a lie, she doubts it is enough to suggest that Bucky and James could coexist) and how James was more than he instructor, but her friend. Her first real friend.

“You met him when you were eleven?” Steve asks, “That would’ve been, what? The nineties?”

“The forties.” She corrects him, and when he gapes, she explains, “I told you, I have a variant of the super-soldier serum in me, I age much slower than a normal human. I don’t know if you do too, but I guess we’ll find out.”

“So...you’re...seventy?”

“Sixty-eight.” She corrects him, and smirks, “I age well, huh?”

He looks her up and down, then blushes because he’s still a forties man and thinks its rude to ogle someone, even if she knows it’s not really ogling and, even if it was, she might let him anyway because she actually doesn’t mind his presence. “Yeah.” He agrees, cheeks pink, and takes a drink from his glass because he doesn’t know what to say and it feels awkward to do nothing.

* * *

The next morning, she is gone before he even awakes, and she is back at the Avengers Tower. She packs up her weapons, slips on her Widow suit under her a deceptively normal bootcut-jeans, green t-shirt and white leather jacket, and heads out to the airport. She’s not straightened her hair today, so it hangs in curls, similar to how she had looked whilst posing as Natalie Rushman, but a little shorter.

No one, thankfully, recognises her on the flight, and she lands in Moscow with no hiccups.

She treks through the dense, wintry forest to the cabin she knows will be there, and that over the years she adapted with a mixture of old Red Room and new SHIELD technology. No one but her can get in, despite the rustic appearance – both inside and out. She opens the door with the only key, throws her weapons bag onto the sofa, and pulls out her laptop, connecting to the wifi that is impossible to trace back to the area.

And she begins to type.

* * *

**_2014 – Classified Location, Outside Moscow, Russia_ **

_Three months later_

When Natasha has reinstated her covers, messed around with the information, concocted her new identity, it is only two months down the line. But with nothing to do other than read her old novels – ranging in sixteen different languages – she soon grows bored. She has always been solitary, but now she finds herself yearning once more for the company only the Avengers can provide. So when she even starts missing Stark, she decides to return to New York before she actually starts to think of him fondly.

She’s spent the past few months in and out of the cabin, wearing wigs and contacts and clothes she’s hope never to be caught dead in – mostly because she doesn’t want to die. Once upon a time she would have cut and dyed her hair, but regardless of whether or not she has a variant of the super-soldier serum in her body, hair can only take so much before giving up and falling out. Besides, she rather fond of her natural red.

* * *

**_2014 – New York City, NY, USA_ **

“Hello, Miss Romanov.” JARVIS British voice is cheery but polite, “A pleasure to have you back. Was your holiday enjoyable?”

She smiles, having missed even the AI security, “Yes.” she replies, as she walks through the lobby. It wasn’t strictly a holiday, but she did what she needed to do; her covers are back in place. “Care to take me to my floor?”

“I’m afraid there have been changes since your last visit, Miss Romanov.” JARVIS tells her, almost sheepish, “Your previous floor has been...let out to a new resident. However, it would be my great pleasure to escort you to your new floor and quarters. No trouble at all.”

She walks inside the lift and smirks upwards, looking directly into the camera that should be too small for anyone to see, but Tony knows she can always find a camera; he’s given up trying to hide them after she nearly killed him for planting about eight in her bedroom. “Are you flirting, JARVIS?” she asks him.

There is a strangely long pause before he answers, “No.”

When she steps out onto her new floor she realises it’s only one above her previous, and she wonders why. Upon questioning JARVIS, the AI reveals only that Steve (for some reason) began to find his Brooklyn apartment too small and cramped. Whilst he still owns it and sleeps there at least two nights a week, he mostly lives in the Tower. JARVIS either doesn’t know, or won’t say why. She assumes the former, because he knows how she hates to be left in the dark, and how it serves as only a problem in the future.

“Ah, Miss Rushman!” Stark is grinning obnoxiously when she enters and she raises an eyebrow in reply. He always calls her that, mostly to piss her off. What she hates most is that it works. Though not enough to make her show it.

“Natasha!” Clint’s sprawled out on the sofa and he smiled at her, raising a hand in greeting before turning back to the TV. She smiles back and notes with a smirk what he’s watching. She doesn’t say anything, though, because he changes the channel too quickly. Her face splits into a proper smile, though, because Steve grabs him by the scruff of the neck and lifts him up. He hugs her properly then, as does Steve. They’re the only two she would accept a hug from, the only two she trusts to touch her skin. But even the others are growing on her; Stark’s friend Rhodey drops by from time to time, and she likes having someone to talk guns with, when Clint is busy marathoning crappy soap opera after crappy soap opera. Maria Hill, who is sat on the other end of Clint's sofa, looks unimpressed at his current choice of TV, but smiles and gives her a cheery wave when she sees Natasha. She has become a regular face at Stark Industries, but has since managed to find an apartment of her own.

Sam Wilson has become a regular, too. Steve’s racing partner, at first, but now as much an Avenger as Coulson (yes, she knows he’s alive, she’s Level 9. Or... _was_ , before SHIELD was taken down) and Hill. Banner had long since emigrated back to India, but ‘visits’ now and then via videochat (Tony tricked him out with a high-tech phone. In fact, they all got one, and though she’s never used it and doesn’t intend to for the foreseeable future, Natasha kept hers and brings it with her almost everywhere).

Only for the sake of Steve and his dislike of attention does she withhold commenting on the look he gives her when she pulls back from his hug. Only because of her caring for him does she withhold her curiosity regarding this look. Only after everyone’s settled down and she’s sat next to Steve on a barstool at the bar, the others having wrestled the remote away from Clint and started watching a film, does she say anything.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, never one to beat around the bush. He looks at her, the dark-brown glass bottle halfway to his mouth. It stops, as does he, and he turns to her, setting the bottle down. She’s drinking the same stuff as he is; non-alcoholic ginger beer. Steve likes is because it reminds him of the forties. She likes it because it's nice, and because she doesn’t want a buzz right now. Stark offered her vodka, but she hates the stuff, only drinking it when she has to. She hates the sight, the smell, the taste. It smells like nail polish remover. It tastes like love and loss.

“And don’t you lie to me.” She adds, “You know I hate being lied to.”

He sighs, and plays with the glass bottle in his hands. He glances over his shoulder, looking with deceptively mild interest at the others, who are all totally engrossed in the film. Then he takes her hand and leads her out, muttering, “It’ll be easier if I show you.”

He instructs JARVIS to take them to Natasha’s old floor, which is now his. She doesn’t know what she’s expecting, maybe some evidence as to where James is. She doesn’t realise how accurate she is until he pushes open the door to his ‘apartment’ and whispers in her ear, “Stay quiet.” Then he pushes open a door to a bedroom, but she knows at first glance it’s not his. It’s missing his collection of forties vinyl, his old sports posters, comics, and some of the Captain America memorabilia that was actually pretty cool – plus the Iron Man mug-turned-pencil-holder that Tony had given him for Christmas. It’s missing the desk that said mug was supposed to stand on, and the paper, both blank and drawn on, that was strewn across the desktop. No, it’s a completely bare room, little better than a prison cell, in some respect. Namely because the occupant of the room, who is sleeping on the bed, is handcuffed to fixtures in the walls that she knows were put there at Steve’s request, because no _way_ would the bedposts hold the occupant.

Not when he’s infused with the same variation of serum as Natasha is. Not when his left arms is an almost indestructible metal alloy. Not when he’s one of the most highly trained individuals in the field of combat in the 21st _and_ the 20th Century.

Not when he’s the Winter Soldier.

* * *

**_1957 – Paris, France_ **

It is four weeks before her eighteenth birthday. Little does she know, it is the last time she will see James for decades. Though he may wear his face in the coming years, it will not be James, it will be the Soldier.

And because she is a child and she loves him, she only notices when it is too late that he is not James. _Too late_ being when she feels a bullet rip through her stomach, and though she was taught to compartmentalise the pain of such a wound, she was never taught to compartmentalise the pain of a broken heart, and she feels its pain. Greater than any bullet wound her training subjected her to, greater than any stab or slice of sharpened metal into young girls’ flesh.

But she does not know that now. Instead, she allows herself to enjoy him. One of the rare times where they have nothing to do, their flight will take them back to the Red Room the following morning, they have the night to themselves and each other.

There is a stain on her dress from the target’s wine glass. It was white wine, it hardly shows, but James notices. He was watching from afar, he knows how the stain got there; how the target dropped the glass, allowing the liquid to splash to the ground, soaking the shimmering slip of fabric she had been wearing, the slip that people dared call a dress that she had removed, leaving her there in her underwear, the dress she had pulled on after killing him. The dress James now traces his fingers over.

She knows he will never admit it, she knows he _can’t_ , but she knows he hates seeing her do that. He hates seeing her give herself to these men, even if it means nothing and she kills them, he hates it. He is the only person she has truly given herself to in that way, the only person who felt her body in his hands and knew it meant something, the only person she gave it to, but not as a tool to complete a mission.

“Are you okay, Natalia?” he asks, bending down so their foreheads touch. If someone walked in, they could be mistaken for soft, carefree lovers. In truth they are hard and cut, glitteringly deadly, poisoned diamonds. They are only this soft around each other. There are a hundred and one ways they could kill each other like this, a snap of fingers, a twist of hips. But they don’t. They could, but they don’t. They never will.

“Yes.” She promises him. And that is why she only feels safe when in his arms. She might hide her nervousness and her fear, she might tune it out, but it is still there. It only truly recedes when she is with him, like this, with no one to steal her memories or punish her for it. She knows love is for children, but maybe that’s because love is so pure and innocent. Like children. Of course, by that logic she should be incapable of love; she is neither pure nor innocent, that part of her died the day KGB took her away. But she _feels_ like a child with him; she feels she can lower her guard and just be herself – or, discover herself, because she still doesn’t really know what she is. All she knows for sure is that the only way she can practically apply the word “love” to her life, is when she applies it to James.

“I know I shouldn’t...” he murmurs to her in Russian. He _should_ be speaking French, but she doesn’t care. His voice is so lovely in Russian, and she has a feeling that these words are not to be overheard by any passer-by or neighbour of their hotel room.

“...But?” she prompts with a smile. She is in his arms, her back pressing into his chest, his arms loose around her waist. They sway slightly in each other’s embrace, though there is no music. It is peaceful. She’s not used to peaceful, but she finds she likes it.

“You know.” He replies, ducking his head, and she can feel his mouth pull into a smile against her skin. She does know. He hates having to watch those parts of the operation, where she has to play the seductress, take off her clothes, climb on top of the sweaty, eager, clumsy men. She would be willing to bet he gets more satisfaction than even she does when she slits their throats. But she doesn’t gamble. Gambling is a coward’s play.

“It means nothing.” She tells him, “You know it does.”

“I do.” He admits, and she feels his words as much as she hears them, the warmth of his breath against her shoulder. “But I’m only human...mostly. I can’t help but feel jealous that they get to see you like that.”

“They don’t live to see it for very long, though.” She reminds him. And he nods at that. He has killed more people than she, having been in the field for much longer. She feels nothing when she kills now. She never has. Well, there was one exception, but you can hardly expect a teenaged girl to be indifferent when she kills a girl she once called a sister. But as for before and since then, nothing. Sometimes a little thrill, when she knows the details of the targets endeavours; a man who forces prostitution, a man who delights in minors, a man who finds torture amusing. She doesn’t find torture amusing. Generally speaking. It was rather satisfying when she tortured him, gave him a taste of his proverbial medicine.

But she pushes away those thoughts now. This is not the place for such thoughts. She’s here with James. One of those few times when they can truly be themselves. Whoever those people are.

There are no more words now. Nothing needs to be said. She is glad to pull off his jacket and shirt and gloves, press her lips to the seam, where flesh becomes metal, and revel in his shudder. She never passes an opportunity to show how much she loves him, even with his metal arm. In truth, it fascinates her, and there seems to be an extra thrill when cool metal touches her skin, her skin which burns white-hot with desire. It is his turn next, when her lips come away, and the slip of a dress she wears is pulled down for the second time that evening. This time, however, she enjoys it. It is glittering scarlet, matching her hair and lipstick perfectly. Both of these are styled and carefully done, to make her look all the more captivating, but she delights in wiping the makeup off roughly with the fabric of the dress, pulling her hair out of the knot so it falls down her bare back in silky-cool curls. He bends his head, and for the first time that evening their lips meet.

It is freedom like she has never tasted before, raging desire and passion, so wonderful and terrible that she finds herself addicted to it; it is torture when he pulls away, even if it is to see where his hands are, to divest her of the lacy scraps of fabric that pass for underwear. She does the same, and soon they are both bare, on the plush bedding of the suite, tasting freedom in each other. He is always nervous when it comes to his metal hand, as though he is worried his desire might hurt her, but even if it did she wouldn’t really care; she loves it, she loves _him_ too much to be bothered by it. She knows, by some technological miracle, he can feel his hand, to an extent. He feels no pain, but he feels her touch as acutely as if it were the flesh he was born with. Both of his hands run over her body as eagerly as hers run over his. Already the contours of his form are committed to her memory, just as the lines of her body are committed to his, burned as fiercely into his mind as his previous life; a memory so potent it will take much more than simple mind wipes to make him forget.

Afterwards, they lie together, content and drowsy. They indulge in each other more times than they care to count, wildly, calmly, quickly, slowly, on the bed, against the wall, anywhere and anyway, they do not waste one precious moment.

It’s as if they know this is the last night they will spend together for more than fifty years.

* * *

**_2014 – New York City, NY, USA_ **

“So...” Steve mumbles. They’re sat in the sort of ‘living room’ of his floor, now. The Winter Soldier is still shackled and asleep, and Natasha is nursing a drink. Vodka, actually. All of a sudden, she got the taste back.

“Don’t you _so_ me, Stephen Grant Rogers.” She growls at him, “What the hell? You brought him _here_? After what he did? He nearly _killed_ you.” she cursed and threw back the vodka to calm herself a little, “Trust me when I say I’ve seen first-hand that _he is not who you remember._ He was a good friend of mine in the fifties, the first man I ever trusted. When I saw him in Iran he didn’t know me, shot me without a second thought. The man I knew was gone, and the man _you_ knew was long gone even before then.” She bites back now, having revealed too much. But Steve is not easily offended, and he is quick to forgive when it comes to his friend. She just worries that perhaps he is too quick, and forgetting that the Soldier was sent to kill him.

“I know.” He agreed, “Why d’you think I cuffed him? I know he’s dangerous, but he’s remembering. And he _did_ save me from drowning, y’know.” He adds mildly. She looks at him now. She can’t believe what she is hearing. _Remembering_. That is more she ever dared hope for. The possibility that James lurked somewhere in those ocean depths of his eyes. The chance that he, in a way, is still alive. She had thought him lost to her; after reading his file and discovering the torture he was subject to, to make him forget Bucky, and later, James, she had thought him lost. Reduced to nothing more than a machine, a dog playing fetch. But he’s remembering.

 _No_. She tells herself, _no, you can’t allow yourself to get compromised. Not now. Steve needs you. You’re the one person he can talk to about this, the one person he can relate to_.

So she swallows her hope. “What does he remember?” she asks, and he shrugs,

“Not entirely sure, I haven’t been able to ask. He sleeps, mostly.” He admitted, “He only got let out of the Block a few days ago.” She knows what the Block is. A cell loosely based on the prison they put Loki in on the Helicarrier; almost impenetrable walls, white and sterile, with a bed, a semi-private bathroom, and an army of medical facilities on the outside, ready to sedate, heal and treat should anything go south.

“I managed to capture him with Sam’s help about two months ago.” He continued, “He remembered enough to not try to kill us, but he still wanted away. So we sedated him and brought him in.” he paused, “Stark did some tests, and he’s healthy as can be.” He doesn’t mention that he has the same variant of serum in his veins as Natasha has in hers. They both already know.

“But...?” she prompts,

“But he doesn’t remember.” He confessed, “At least, not all of it. His rages only calmed down a few days ago. They released him, but he has to stay on this floor and be cuffed when he sleeps.” He brought a hand to his eyes and rubbed tiredly, “He barely wakes. I leave food and stuff for him, and he seems to be eating it...” He sighed, “I don’t know.” He admitted, “I don’t know if it’s conscious or not, but he’s remembering things.”

“Like what?” she asks.

“Like...in-jokes from when we were kids. Weird memories that even _I’ve_ forgotten.” He paused, “Sometimes he speaks in Russian. And I think...a couple times... he said _Natalia_. That’s why I wanted to show you.” She doesn’t know how to react to this. All she can think of is that there’s a chance James may still be in there. A chance he may still be alive. And suddenly she’s hoping beyond hope that James returns, that maybe she can bring him back if he tastes freedom. Then she realises that doing so would be wishing Bucky dead forever. That doesn’t dent it much. She’s still hoping. But she keeps that to herself. She will not do that to Steve, she will not rob him of the last remnant of his life in the forties, not _this_ remnant. She will do everything in her power to get Bucky back. But her heart will not truly be in it. Half of it will be helping Steve, the other half, in a way, sabotaging him.

She bids Steve goodbye and says she has to think some stuff over. She lies in her bed that night and thinks about the shell of a man lying, sleeping, just one floor below her. The man she loves, and the man she fears. The only man she has ever loved, and the only man she has ever feared. She drinks, heavily, refusing company to all, even Clint, who stays knocking at the door for ages. She does not mean to hurt his feelings, and he is still her best friend, no matter what, but she needs to be alone. She drinks herself into incoherence, and passes out on her bed. The empty bottle she is holding in her hand is not a vodka bottle. All too soon she has once more lost the taste. It no longer tastes like vodka.

It tastes like love and loss.


End file.
